St. Petersburg. Vasilevsky Island - Kunstkamera Building

The Kunstkamera was the first museum in Russia. It was established by Peter the Great on the Neva Riverfront facing the Winter Palace in 1727. The museum was dedicated to preserving "natural and human curiosities and rarities". The tsar´s personal collection, features a large assortment of human and animal fetuses with anatomical deficiencies, which Peter bought from the Dutch anatomist. In 1716 Peter established the mineral cabinet of Kunstkamera, depositing there a collection of 1195 minerals. In the 1830s, the Kunstkamera collections were dispersed to newly established imperial museums, the most important being the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, established in 1879, with a collection approaching 2,000,000 items. The museum is still housed in the Kunstkamera and bears the name of Peter the Great since 1903.